Tag Archives: David Davis

Once upon a time, I believed this blog would be able to keep up with all the crazy stuff happening in the world. Whenever something crazy happened somewhere, I thought, I would publish timely, perceptive and erudite comment on it.

However, in the past year, I’ve come to realize this policy is untenable. Thanks to the antics of Trump, Putin, Rajoy, Erdogan, Duterte, Kim Jong Un, etc., there’s an entire planet-load of craziness – bad craziness – going on 24/7. And it isn’t humanly possible to keep abreast of it all.

Still, I thought I’d make a few comments about the craziness happening in British politics just now. Here are a few things I’ve learnt from it over the past fortnight.

Harvey Weinstein is a butterfly

According to Wikipedia, Chaos Theory propounds the idea of “the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state”. Or to use a popular metaphor, a butterfly flapping its wings in Argentina may lead, a few weeks later, to a tornado occurring in Texas.

In British politics, however, an earthquake has been caused not by a butterfly, but by the blubbery, walrus-like form of Hollywood movie-mogul Harvey Weinstein flapping around in an ever-constricting net of allegations about him being a rapist, sex-pest, harasser, stalker and general monster towards the women who’ve had to endure his professional company over the decades. This has encouraged women (and sometimes men) in other vocations and other places to speak out about how about they’ve been sexually exploited and mistreated too. Including, eventually, in politics in Britain.

From North Yorks Enquirer

How distant and unimportant the Weinstein scandal must’ve seemed to certain male British parliamentarians a few weeks ago. Most of them probably hadn’t even heard of Weinstein before. Some of them probably hadn’t watched a Hollywood movie since, oh, Deep Throat with Linda Lovelace in 1972. No, they must have thought, while they flicked through the pornographic images on their Westminster computer screens or groped the lower limbs of lady journalists trying to interview them or composed and fired off lewd text messages to whatever femme du jour had taken their fancy or shouted at their female assistants, “Oi, Sugar Tits, nip down to the sex shop and buy me a new vibrator, will you?” Absolutely nothing to do with me.

Somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that various male politicos saw themselves as irresistible, hot-and-funky sex-hunks, even if that view wasn’t shared by the unfortunate people who were the target of their amorous advances. What does surprise me is the amount of victim-blaming that’s gone on in the Daily Mail since the scandal broke – it’s published a string of articles belittling the women who’ve made allegations, such as Kate Maltby and Andrea Leadsom. Yes, I know, it’s the Daily Mail, which exists to be despicable. But it’s the only national British newspaper where women form the majority of its readership.

It makes you wonder a bit, a teeny wee bit, if they’re worried that this exposure of sexual misconduct in the film and political worlds might be followed by more of the same in the journalistic one.

Priti Patel’s holiday sounds like a bundle of laughs

Meanwhile, there’s the saga of Priti Patel, who until yesterday was Minister for International Development.

It transpires that in August Priti went on holiday to Israel. Evidently, she was keen to find a way of making her holiday less ghastly than holidays normally are, what with delayed flights, crowded terminals, rip-off taxi drivers, scam artists, pickpockets, crap hotels, jam-packed tourist attractions, overpriced tourist tat, screaming children, moaning teenagers, biting insects, sunburn, food poisoning, hangovers and fights with German holidaymakers over who got to the sun-loungers first.

So what did she do? She decided to intersperse her holiday activities with clandestine meetings with Binyamin Netanyahu and other Israeli bigwigs, where the discussions included the possibility of channeling some of Britain’s foreign-aid money towards funding Israeli Army activities in the occupied Golan Heights. Wow. Binyamin Netanyahu. That sounds like a brilliant way to spice up your holiday.

Unfortunately for Priti, the BBC decided to share some of her holiday snapshots with the nation on November 3rd. And – surprise! – that was the first her boss Theresa May had heard about it.

From@ yairlapid

From paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com

If Boris Johnson rides to your rescue – hide!

On November 1st, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson – I feel a chill run through me every time I type those five words – spoke up in defence of the British-Iranian woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who’s been imprisoned in Tehran since 2016 on charges of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government.

She claims she’d only gone to Iran for a holiday and to visit relatives. Yet the bold Boris announced to a parliamentary committee that she’d been there “teaching people journalism”. Stirring stuff – until the Iranian authorities seized on his words as justification for keeping her in prison. In fact, there’s now a real possibility that they might extend her sentence.

People have demanded that Johnson be sacked for his stupidity, but I’d go further and have him arrested – is being the world’s biggest gobshite a criminal offence? Then Britain could approach Iran and ask if they’d like to swap prisoners.

David Davis can make things stop existing by the power of his will

Once, there were supposed to be 58 sectoral analyses looking at how the 58 most important parts of the British economy would fare after Brexit. These ran from A to (almost) Z, from Advertising and Marketing to Wholesale Markets and Investment Banking. According to a written ministerial statement, each one was “a wide mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis, contained in a range of documents developed at different times since the referendum. It examines the nature of activity in the sectors, how trade is conducted with the EU currently in these sectors and, in many cases, considers the alternatives following the UK’s exit from the EU as well as considering existing precedents.”

Well, that sounds thorough, doesn’t it? That sounds like someone had been doing their homework – conducting serious research about the challenges facing the UK economy once Brexit has been enacted. Right?

Except that Brexit Secretary David Davis has just declared that no such things exist. There “is not, nor there has ever been, a series of discreet impact assessments examining the quantitative impact of Brexit on those sectors,” he told MPs on November 7th, contradicting everything that’d been said before.

How odd that suddenly they don’t exist. You might almost think they constituted such grim reading that they were made not to exist.

The leaked Paradise Papers have contained many revelations about where the rich and powerful have been stashing their cash – beyond the reaches of their countries’ taxmen, obviously. Among those named are Britain’s Royal Family. For example, we now know that millions of pounds from the Queen’s private estate have ended up in a fund in the Cayman Islands.

You’d expect the British media to make hay about this. Yet they’ve appeared more interested in another Paradise Papers revelation, i.e. that three stars of the bawdy Irishman-in-drag TV sitcom Mrs Brown’s Boys – Patrick Houlihan, Martin Delany and Fiona Delany – have avoided paying tax on two million pounds by sneakily transferring the money to Mauritius and back.

This means either that Mrs Brown and her offspring are now more important to the British public than the Queen is; or that Britain’s brown-nosing journalists prefer to focus on some minor comedy actors to take the heat off the monarchy. I believe the first reason to be true, obviously.

Mind you, say what you like about the Queen, but she usually has more gravitas than to accidentally skewer someone up the bum with a rectal thermometer or use a dildo to whisk cream while the priest’s visiting.